Nick Wrote:Where can I find ODE for Mac? I can only find Windows binaries. It's the only thing I need to compile your code.

Download the ODE tarballs from sourceforge and read the README and INSTALL files. I've been building ODE from source tarballs on the command line for over a year now without problems. Well, actually, early on there were mac problems but yours truly submitted patches to fix that.

It will build a static library. You can then just add that lib to your probject and add the headers dir to your include path. And wham. ODE.

By the way, ODE is amazing -- steep learning curve, but awesome. Print out the documentation and read it a few times from front to back, and examine the source code for the demos.

I made a space station for our game Rhino using Wings 3D. I've got to say Wings 3D is an awesome program for being free. The workflow is really good - this is the most important part of a modeling program!! - and the UV unwrapping is great. You'll prolly want to tweak the UVs in some other program after you unwrap, which is what I did.

I'd really recommend giving Wings3D a shot. Other good non-free options are Silo and Modo, both run on OS X. They also have good workflows, although I haven't tried Modo yet - I'm just going from what I've learned at CGTalk and their videos.

Unwrapping in Wings3D is great. You just specify the edges you want to break apart and Wings unwraps the mesh and assigns a checkerboard texture so you can check how evenly a texture will be applied to it. It's not a perfect process, which is why I recommend another app to tweak and sew UVs, but it saves a LOT of time in that first step to unwrapping before you nit-pick and try to optimize texture space.

For my space station, Wings3D was great for using edge loops and rings to extrude stuff. I just love the workflow. The only things it's really missing is a manipulator for moving/rotating/scaling. You get used to doing it through a menu, but it would be nice to have that manipulator if you want.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Wings3D is basically a free rip-off (a good one at that) of these two other programs Nendo and Mirai, which seem to be stalled at the moment due to IP issues, but I think they are in the works again. If they can do as good a job with workflow as they did with modeling, those apps are going to rule.

Let me know if anyone needs more pics or something, and I'll try to scrounge some up.